Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

“Um,” said Caquer. “You’re sure you didn’t get mixed up on those prints, Dr. Skidder?”

“How could I? I took only one copy from each body, Rod. If I had shuffled them just now while we were looking at them, the results would be the same. All three prints are alike.”

“But they can’t be.”

Skidder shrugged.

“I think we should lay this before the Regent, direct,” he said. “I’ll call him and arrange an audience. Okay?”

Half an hour later, he was giving the whole story to Regent Barr Maxon, with Dr. Skidder corroborating the main points. The expression on Regent Maxon’s face made Lieutenant Rod Caquer glad, very glad, that he had that corroboration.

“You agree,” Maxon asked, “that this should be taken up with the Sector Coordinator, and that a special investigator should be sent here to take over?” A bit reluctantly, Caquer nodded. “I hate to admit that I’m incompetent, Regent, or that I seem to be,” Caquer said. “But this isn’t an ordinary crime. Whatever goes on it’s way over my head. And there may be something even more sinister than murder behind it.”

“You’re right, Lieutenant. I’ll see that a qualified man leaves headquarters today and he’ll get in touch with you.”

“Regent,” Caquer asked, “has any machine or process ever been invented that will—uh—duplicate a human body, with or without the mind being carried over?”

Maxon seemed puzzled by the question.

“You think Deem might have been playing around with something that bit him? No, to my knowledge a discovery like that has never been approached. Nobody has ever duplicated, except by constructive imitation, even an inanimate object. You haven’t heard of such a thing, have you, Skidder?”

“No,” said the Medical Examiner. “I don’t think even your friend Perry Peters could do that, Rod.”

From Regent Maxon’s office, Caquer went to Deems shop. Brager was in charge there, and Brager helped him search the place thoroughly. It was a long and laborious task, because each book and reel had to be examined minutely.

The printers of illicit books, Caquer knew, were clever at disguising their product. Usually, forbidden books bore the cover and title page, often even the opening chapters, of some popular work of fiction, and the projection reels were similarly disguised.

Jupiter-lighted darkness was falling outside when they finished, but Rod Caquer knew they had done a thorough job. There wasn’t an indexed book anywhere in the shop, and every reel had been run off on the projector.

Other men, at Rod Caquer’s orders, had been searching Deem’s apartment with equal thoroughness. He phoned there, and got a report, completely negative.

“Not so much as a Venusian pamphlet,” said the man in charge at the apartment, with what Caquer thought was a touch of regret in his voice.

“Did you come across a lathe, a small one for delicate work?” Rod asked.

“Um—no, we didn’t see anything like that. One room’s turned into a workshop, but there’s no lathe in it. Is it important?”

Caquer grunted noncommittally. What was one more mystery, and a minor one at that, to a case like this?

“Well, Lieutenant,” Brager said when the screen had gone blank, “What do we do now?”

Caquer sighed.

“You can go off duty, Brager,” he said. “But first arrange to leave men on guard here and at the apartment. I’ll stay until whoever you send comes to relieve me.”

When Brager had left, Caquer sank wearily into the nearest chair. He felt terrible, physically, and his mind just did not seem to be working. He let his eyes run again around the orderly shelves of the shop and their orderliness oppressed him.

If there was only a clue of some sort. Wilder Williams had never had a case like this in which the only leads were two identical corpses, one of which had been killed five different ways and the other did not have a mark or sign of violence. What a mess, and where did he go from here?

Well, he still had the list of people he was going to interview, and there was time to see at least one of them this evening.

Should he look up Perry Peters again, and see what, if anything, the lanky inventor could make of the disappearance of the lathe? Perhaps he might be able to suggest what had happened to it. But then again, what could a lathe have to do with a mess like this? One cannot turn out a duplicate corpse on a lathe.

Or should he look up Professor Gordon? He decided to do just that.

He called the Gordon apartment on the visiphone, and Jane appeared in the screen.

“How’s your father, Jane?” asked Caquer. “Will he be able to talk to me for a while this evening?”

“Oh, yes,” said the girl. “He’s feeling much better, and thinks he’ll go back to his classes tomorrow. But get here early if you’re coming. Rod, you look terrible; what’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, except I feel goofy. But I’m all right, I guess.”

“You have a gaunt, starved look. When did you eat last?”

Caquer’s eyes widened. “Earth! I forgot all about eating. I slept late and didn’t even have breakfast!”

Jane Gordon laughed.

“You dope! Well, hurry around and I’ll have something ready for you when you get here.”

“But—”

“But nothing. How soon can you start?”

A minute after he had clicked off the visiphone, Lieutenant Caquer went to answer a knock on the shuttered door of the shop.

He opened it. “Oh, hullo, Reese,” he said. “Did Brager send you?”

The policeman nodded.

“He said I was to stay here in case. In case what?”

“Routine guard duty, that’s all,” explained Caquer. “Say, I’ve been stuck here all afternoon Anything going on?”

“A little excitement. We been pulling in soap-box orators off and on all day. Screwballs. There’s an epidemic of them.”

“The devil you say! What are they hepped about?”

“Sector Two, for some reason I can’t make out. They’re trying to incite people to get mad at Sector Two and do something about it. The arguments they use are plain nutty.”

Something stirred uneasily in Rod Caquer’s memory—but he could not quite remember what it was. Sector Two? Who’d been telling him things about Sector Two recently—usury, unfairness, tainted blood, something silly. Although of course a lot of the people over there did have Martian blood in them…

“How many of the orators were arrested?” he asked.

“We got seven. Two more slipped away from us, but we’ll pick them up if they start spouting again.”

Lieutenant Caquer walked slowly, thoughtfully, to the Gordon apartment, trying his level best to remember where, recently, he heard anti-Sector Two propaganda. There must be something back of the simultaneous appearance of nine soap-box radicals, all preaching the same doctrine.

A sub-rosa political organization? But none such had existed for almost a century now. Under a perfectly democratic government, component part of a stable system-wide organization of planets, there was no need for such activity. Of course an occasional crackpot was dissatisfied, but a group in that state of mind struck him as fantastic.

It sounded as crazy as the Willem Deem case. That did not make sense either. Things happened meaninglessly, as in a dream. Dream? What was he trying to remember about a dream? Hadn’t he had an odd sort of dream last night—what was it?

But, as dreams usually do, it eluded his conscious mind.

Anyway, tomorrow he would question—or help question—those radicals who were under arrest. Put men on the job of tracing them back, and undoubtedly a common background somewhere, a tie-up, would be found.

It could not be accidental that they should all pop on the same day. It was screwy, just as screwy as the two inexplicable corpses of a book-and-reel shop proprietor. Maybe because the cases were both screwy, his mind tended to couple the two sets of events. But taken together, they were no more digestible than taken separately. They made even less sense.